Published on December 2nd, 2022
Do you have a fully functional sales team but they lack somewhere in their technical concepts?
Are you looking to bridge the gap between sales and technology to bring out the best in your products and services?
You need to hire a sales engineer!
But first….
Operational Questions
If a client had a technical problem but none of your solutions worked, how would you proceed?
What advantages do our products have over those of our competitors, and how would you describe them?
A significant prospective client asks for a feature that we don't yet provide. How do you answer the potential client and who do you inform about it?
Your manager sets a goal that you think is unrealistic. How do you respond to it?
Behavioral Questions
How can you be sure that your audience understands technically difficult terminology?
What motivates you to excel at work?
What has been the largest obstacle to technical communication for you? How did you get through it?
Describe a project you worked on that resulted in a sale. Whom did you collaborate with and what exactly did you contribute?
Tips for Hiring a Sales Engineer
Finding a Suitable Sales Engineer
When choosing a qualified sales engineer, a solid reference network is crucial. So, one approach to hiring is to ask the recruiters to recommend the greatest sales engineers they have ever worked with. A different approach is to attempt to categorize the technical skill sets that are crucial for your business.
To find the groups where these technical qualifications are most prevalent, you can use internet networks like Linkedin. Choosing a candidate from a university is a common mistake to avoid when making the first hire. Generally, you want your team to begin with someone who has greater business leadership and expertise.
The typical interview process for hiring sales engineers begins with technical questions and specifications, moves to face-to-face interviews, incorporates a live mock presentation along the way to evaluate sales skills, and concludes by involving sales representatives to consider fit and synergy with your sales team.
Look for Specific Skills and Qualities
Hiring sales engineers who are exclusively sales savvy and skilled presenters is a significant advantage, but the most crucial skill is the ability to communicate difficult technical concepts in an engaging manner.
Your sales engineers should be evaluated on their revenue statistics, teamwork, and feedback translation as soon as possible after being hired. The phrase "teamwork" describes an individual's ability to share technical assets, such as presentation demos, best practices, and competitive knowledge, with the rest of the team.
Feedback translation is the ability to effectively relay customer feedback to product management and assist product engineers in understanding current market trends and goals.
Putting up a good Incentive Plan
Sales engineers should always be treated consistently with your sales team and should have a commission-based plan. Compensation should be based on a 70/30 plan, where 70% of the compensation is a basic salary and 30% is based on quota.
It's crucial to pay your sales engineers in accordance with how much you pay your sales representatives. For instance, to maintain alignment, you should pay commission to sales engineers on renewals just as you do to salespeople.
Although there are various compensation variables, emerging SaaS companies frequently aim to reward renewals because sales teams are primarily concerned with keeping existing clients.
Following are three additional tips on what “NOT” to do when hiring a sales engineer.
Hiring the Wrong Fit Based on the Complexity of your Product
Don't hire the most technical sales engineer available if your business is in the early or growth stage and delivering a not overly sophisticated solution to small and midmarket customers.
Due to the high salaries of those sales engineers and the fact that they are accustomed to handling more complicated problems, this will ultimately cost you a lot of money.
Alternatively, don't recruit a newcomer if your organization requires a highly technical sales engineer because doing so is a surefire way to lose the prospect's trust during the sales cycle.
Offering a very Unattractive Compensation Package
Sales engineers are one of the best-paid professionals in the market. Companies lose a lot of time by entering the market with a compensation plan that is unable to entice top talent, and even if they are successful in hiring a fantastic sales engineer, they face the danger of losing them to a competitor who is offering a competitive salary.
Over Selling and Under Delivering
The sales engineer has challenging work because they support several sales reps (2–6) and travel 50–75 percent of the time. When recruiting sales engineers, businesses need to set realistic expectations for them so that they are aware of what to expect and can manage the workload based on their personal circumstances.
There are many fascinating opportunities available for dejected sales engineers to pursue, therefore firms that don't set the correct expectations may see high turnover rates in their technical sales teams.
Concluding Thoughts
Sales engineers are a hot cake right now and every organization is trying to hire the best one for their sales team.
If you hire with the given criteria in mind, your sales team will overcome many hurdles. These skills are not always easily teachable so hire the person that has demonstrated the ability to learn, get to the root cause, pursue all angles, persist, and of course present. Find an engineer that can sell!
If you’re someone who is looking for a sales engineer for your company, you need to pull up your socks and follow these tips to hire the best candidate for your organization.
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